Aug. 19th, 2019 10:52 pm
FIC: Bad in the Blood [Shelton/Sledge]
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thrillingdetectivetalesBAD IN THE BLOOD
Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge
Author's Note: Written for![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
hc_bingo , with only extremely surface-level research into period-accurate medical procedures and rushed along anyway because I just wanted to get it done, dammit. Follows along with show canon, where Snafu goes with Sledge and—presumably—the rest of K Company to do occupation duty in China, but borrows the bit about blood poisoning and the "hot soak" treatment from the actual canon of Sledge's book "China Marine."
This my first foray into writing these two, and I sincerely hope that I did them justice. Many thanks toscandalinbohemia for the quick-pass and suggestions, which made this fic roughly six thousand times better and several hundred words shorter. You are a gem.
You can also read it over on AO3.
Eugene was roused from the fitful half-doze he’d only just managed to grasp onto a few short hours earlier by the feeling of a cool palm curling over his sweat-beaded forehead. He whimpered as another shiver wracked through him, trembling all the way out to his fingertips, and fought to open his sore eyes.
There was a nondescript pillar of Marine khaki standing in front of him. Eugene followed the dizzy, bleary line of his gaze until it finally meandered up far enough to land on the hovering smudge of Shelton’s face.
“Sledgehammer?” Shelton said, low and concerned, a shallow divot dimpling the line of his brow. “You don’t look so good.”
Eugene huffed as much of a laugh as he could manage—a pitiful little scrap of mirth that barely made it past his teeth—and tried weakly to wet his lips without much success.
“M’fine,” he murmured. His voice was scraped raw, tone brittle and thin, catching rough in his throat like it did whenever he had the flu. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had any water. His canteen had run dry sometime in the gauzy twilit hours of the previous evening and Eugene had been too exhausted to get up and refill it.
Shelton frowned down at him, maybe for just a second, maybe for a whole ten minutes. Eugene couldn’t really be sure—time seemed to be moving in fits and starts, streaking past at roaring P-39 speeds that left him reeling in their slipstream or else crawling along so thick and taffy-slow that it made him ache to try and wade through it. All he was really sure of was the steady sweep of Shelton’s thumb across his hairline, blessedly cool against his skin.
“Been takin’ your atabrine?” Shelton asked eventually.
Eugene nodded, another shudder rattling its way up from his feet, and confirmed drowsily, “Ev’ryday.”
Shelton made a small, dissatisfied noise above him. His thumb was careful and tender where it dragged lightly across Eugene’s temple, traced down around the curve of his ear. Eugene’s stomach twisted at the sensation, cramping with the sudden force of his longing. He curled into himself like a pill-bug to keep from doing anything foolish, like reaching out and grabbing dumbly at Shelton’s narrow hips.
Shelton sighed and brushed the sweat-soaked fringe up off of Eugene’s forehead, pressing skeptically, “You sure ‘bout that, boo?”
“Didn’ w-wanna get ma-ma-malaria,” Eugene assured him, shivering with enough force that it shook a stutter into his words. His teeth had been chattering so loud and long that his jaw felt bruised from the tension. It was a miracle he hadn’t woken anybody sooner, reduced as he was to this quivering puddle of human misery.
“Well, you come down with somethin’, cher,” Shelton observed. He let his hand slide down to cup Eugene’s cheek and for an insane moment Eugene was possessed of the sharp desire to turn his face and press a kiss to it.
He rolled over into his pillow instead, pushing his heat-flushed cheek into the fabric and twisting his fingers against his cot. Shelton followed the motion of his body as he turned, hand skimming down to land possessively at the base of his neck. Eugene whimpered at the familiar weight and tried to shy away, but Shelton either didn’t notice or decided not to let him. The easy intimacy of the gesture made his head spin even faster and kicked the low pulse in his temples up to an angry throbbing.
He’d thought they weren’t doing this anymore—they were well out of the jungle now, at least by a given definition, and Shelton had made it abundantly clear that he’d only take a hand from the likes of Eugene if they were stuck on some tropical hellscape with the threat of death hanging dark and constant over their heads.
“No place for it among civilized men,” he had explained with a lazy shrug some months before, when Eugene leaned in to kiss him in the cozy darkness of their squad tent, dizzy with relief for having survived Peleliu and hoping to celebrate now they had some time and the relative privacy to use it. Shelton’s bayou drawl had run cool with the same flippant remove he’d wielded against Eugene and the rest of the new boots that first day on Pavuvu, a blunt-edged cruelty that had left them all feeling unsettled and unwanted from the moment they marched ashore. It was jarring to hear it again after so many weeks tucked tight together in a filthy foxhole, with Shelton’s low, amused voice coiling against his cheek and his breath the only warmth for miles, but Eugene knew better than to overstep a man’s boundaries, particularly in matters like this.
The game changed again, without notice or explanation, when they were shipped out into the choking jungles of Okinawa. While Eugene hadn’t been too proud to turn away from Shelton’s questing fingers when they slipped under his dungarees in the mud and the cold and the rain, he had been cautiously keeping his distance since they crawled back off those impenetrable ridges, trying his best to respect whatever strange, impermeable rules governed Shelton’s singularly mind-bending approach to intimacy.
Shelton, it seemed, shared no similar compunction toward propriety. He sighed again and traced his calloused palm all the way down Eugene’s bare, sweat-slick back to rest in the dip above his waist with a casual confidence that made Eugene’s throat tighten and his heart pound. He trembled under Shelton’s hand, panting thinly into the stretched canvas cot. Every breath was hot and musty with salt, coral dust and island sand combining to coat his tongue in a layer of fine grit.
Eugene screwed his eyes shut and moaned miserably, “Snaf.”
“Right here, Genie,” Shelton murmured in response, so quiet that Eugene suspected he wasn’t really meant to have heard. The diminutive sent a shiver of an entirely different stripe dancing down Eugene’s spine. Shelton, no doubt mistaking this for a tremor of the same wretched discomfort he had seen so strongly in evidence thus far, stroked Eugene’s side in a long, slow sweep.
“Think you can stand for me?”
It seemed a peculiar question to Eugene’s feverishly wheeling mind, so he cracked an eye up at Shelton—who was frowning handsomely down at him, looking good enough to kiss despite his sweat-stained undershirt and dirt-streaked face, hair slightly matted from a few days’ lack of shower—and sighed exhaustedly, “Why?”
“Gotta get you down to the aid station,” Shelton explained. His hand was still resting possessively on Eugene’s back, his touch astonishingly tender against Eugene’s clammy, goose-pimpled skin. “Can’t have you dyin’ all alone in your rack a week before we ship outta this shithole for good, an’ that putain de docteur on duty got himself so busy with some inventory checklist he can’t be bothered with a house call.”
“Ain’t dyin’,” Eugene mumbled contrarily, mind latching onto the only part of that honey-slow missive that made any sense.
“Might could be,” Shelton shot back. He nudged at Eugene’s side and cupped his other hand over Eugene’s elbow, trying ineffectually to guide him up from both angles. “C’mon now, Sledgehammer,” he coaxed. The soft lilt of his voice made Eugene’s stomach twist and dip, rocking as a ship unmoored. “What am I s’posed to write Missus Sledge if you buy it now, huh? She gonna believe me when I say her darlin’ baby boy died ‘cause he was too much a stubborn fool to get his ass carted down to the corpsman?”
“Probably,” Eugene agreed hazily, mouth half-buried in the lumpy mass of his pillow. He could feel his pulse in his temples and in his wrists. It was thrumming so fast, like the frantic winging of a hummingbird, the frenzied tremolo of a drumroll in some swinging jazz number. Eugene considered vaguely that he might throw up. “She kn-knows what m’ like.”
“Yeah, well, so do I,” Shelton muttered irritably, and reached underneath Eugene to wrap his hands around the cot’s metal frame. He tipped the whole thing, hefting it just high enough to dump Eugene ignominiously to the sand with a strangled yelp—no small feat considering that Eugene was very slightly larger than Shelton’s own modest frame and, in his current half-broiled state, as good as deadweight, besides.
Perhaps Eugene would be duly impressed after he managed to recover his breath, when his head didn’t feel quite so much like it was swimming in bright, booze-soaked cotton and being pounded with a rubber mallet.
“Up you come, Sledge,” Shelton instructed unsympathetically, hooking his elbows under Eugene’s armpits and making to haul him forcibly to his feet.
Eugene made a clumsy attempt to cooperate but his knees went to water beneath him, depositing him none too kindly straight back into the dirt. The ground tilted, lurching up toward his face for a teetering moment before dropping suddenly away again, and Eugene’s stomach rolled with it. He hunched forward, gripping at the sand so tightly that it rushed in thick white streams up between his fingers.
“Gene?” Shelton asked, hand fluttering down the line of Eugene’s back, which had gone strung suddenly taut.
Eugene opened his mouth to warn Shelton that he might want to take a step back but only succeeded in upturning his stomach all over the downy sands and the scattered tufts of scrub grass.
“Shit,” Shelton sighed, rubbing a hand in slow, steady strokes across Eugene’s shoulders while he retched and heaved.
There was nothing much to come up—Eugene hadn’t made it to chow since the morning of the day before—but it still seemed that he was locked there forever, trapped in a moment of eternal punishment like some tragic Greek hero with his stomach clenching against his will while his throat constricted and burned. When he finally finished his eyes were stinging, arms trembling and threatening to give under his own weight. He gasped a thick, glutinous breath and spat between his hands.
“That’s it, cher,” Shelton was encouraging gently from somewhere above him, still petting at his shoulders. “Let it all out, now.”
“Fuck,” Eugene croaked, squeezing his eyes shut against the hot press of tears. He flinched when Shelton smoothed a thumb from the nape of his neck down to where his spine dipped between his shoulder blades and pointedly shrugged Shelton’s hand off, breathing shallowly through his mouth and demanding weakly, “The hell’d you do that for?”
“Hadda get you on your feet somehow,” Shelton replied with his usual air of amused disaffection. He shuffled around behind Eugene for a moment, digging through the various belongings strewn haphazardly around the tent and making soft, dismissive noises under his breath until he came up with a slightly battered canteen. He knelt back down at Eugene’s side and tilted it enticingly back and forth. “Here,” he said, while the water sloshed lazily. “Hit of this oughta help.”
Eugene settled carefully back on his heels, reaching out to accept the canteen with shaking fingers. He swilled the first sip around in his mouth a few times, chasing the acid tang from between his teeth, and spat it out before availing himself of another few small, careful mouthfuls. The water was tepid verging on warm and tasted bitterly metallic with the residue of an iodine tablet, but it soothed Eugene’s aching throat and settled calmly enough in his sore stomach.
“Thanks,” he murmured when he felt sufficiently sated, handing the canteen back over.
Shelton nodded and screwed the cap on before tossing it to settle awkwardly on its side against Eugene’s much-abused pillow. He pushed himself to his feet and brushed his palms across his thighs, kicking up little clouds of dust off his sand-encrusted dungarees.
“You ready to see the corpsman now?” he asked, extending a hand with a smirk. Eugene suspected that rolling his eyes would only see him emptying his belly into the dirt for a second time, so he settled for glaring darkly up at Shelton as he let himself be hauled to his feet.
“What’re you doin’ up so early anyway?” Eugene asked rudely while Shelton situated their bodies against one another to his own satisfaction—one arm around Eugene’s back and the other clamped tightly to Eugene’s wrist where he’d slung an arm over Shelton’s shoulders in turn.
“Sledgehammer,” Shelton said slowly, mouth pursed into a frown, “it’s four o’clock.”
“What?” Eugene frowned, bewildered and incredulous, as Shelton urged him into a controlled stagger toward the flap at the front of the tent. “I ain’t slept that long since I was back in Mobile.”
Shelton snorted. “Did today, boo.”
Eugene stared at him for a long, baffled second, and demanded stupidly, “How?”
“Dunno,” Shelton shrugged, shaking his head with a smirk. “Tried to get you up for chow this mornin’, but you weren’t havin’ none of it. Had a mind to let you sleep ‘til you was feelin’ better, only I come to check on you just now and found you lyin’ there lookin’ whiter’n maggots on rice.” The humor faded from his face and he turned his pale eyes on Eugene with a heavy, reserved wariness that Eugene couldn’t quite place. “Figured it was ‘bout time to drag you down and let the Navy boys fix you up, since you don’t seem too keen on seein’ to it yourself.”
He eased Eugene out through the tent’s opening, mumbling encouragements when Eugene whimpered and closed his eyes against the fierce yellow glare of the late afternoon sun.
“Fuck,” he breathed weakly. “‘S hot.”
“Always is,” Shelton agreed, giving Eugene’s shoulder a soft, subtle squeeze. “Ain’t got too far to go, now, Sledgehammer. Just keep slidin’ one foot in front of the other, just like that. Won’t go breakin’ any land speed records, but it’ll be miracle enough you keep movin’.”
“Snafu?” Eugene gritted furiously past his clenched teeth, squinting one eye open just wide enough to make out the bleary impression of the ground in front of him as he trundled slowly forward. “Shut the hell up.”
“You a mean ol’ bobcat when y’sick, ain’tcha Sledge?” Shelton crooned, ignoring him and sounding positively delighted by the unexpected discovery of this character flaw, besides. “Better light a candle for whatever poor, unsuspectin’ Alabama sweetheart you pin down back home, boy. Somebody gotta warn her she gon’ be wrasslin’ a wild animal the minute you got so much as a sniffle.”
“Fuck off,” Eugene snapped. Something cold and unpleasant dropped into the pit of his gut to hear Shelton joking that way, though he supposed it was no great surprise that his bedside manner left much to be desired. Eugene would have gladly shoved him over into the dirt if such action wouldn’t have toppled Eugene onto his ass right alongside him.
He was properly shaking now, rattling in Shelton’s grip harder than the recoil off one of the .30 caliber machine guns. His entire body felt soaked through with heat and sweat, skin prickling and joints aching. Eugene wondered at the spectacle he must make, panting like a dog while Shelton, of all people, guided his trembling form down the narrow gravel lane. He was distantly aware of familiar voices calling out to them, fellow Marines barraging Shelton with questions about Eugene’s wellbeing and only half-feigning horror as to his current condition. He left it to Shelton to holler amiably back—much as it annoyed him, he was in no fit state to answer on his own behalf.
By the time they stumbled into the aid station, Eugene was gasping like he’d just finished a marathon, body juddering fit to shake apart. He had shifted a little more of his weight onto Shelton’s shoulders with every quavering step and was forced to admit, to the great detriment of his personal pride, that he remained vertical almost solely by the virtue of Shelton’s support.
“Bring him on in,” drawled the corpsman on duty without looking up from the clipboard he had in hand.
There was a series of shadowed figures lying despondently on a row of racks against the tent’s far wall, poor bastards awaiting proper medical evacuation for some grievous wounds or persistent illnesses. Eugene squinted blearily over while one of them shifted and sighed a quiet moan into the gloom.
The corpsman raised a hand without looking and pointed at something on Shelton’s other side, instructing briskly, “Set him there.”
Shelton nodded and dragged Eugene slowly over to a canvas folding chair propped unobtrusively in the corner, where he shrugged him off with all the tender care one might afford a wildly cumbersome and particularly heavy seabag.
“Goddamn, Sledgehammer,” he grumbled, pressing both hands to his lower back and stretching his chest up toward the ceiling while Eugene sat wheezing and glaring and trying to catch the breath that felt like it had been knocked out of him. “For a fella can’t keep his food down you heavier’n a box full of fuckin’ M69 rounds.”
“Didn’t - ask you - f’r help,” Eugene said thinly, sentiment punctured by the intermittent gasps he couldn’t help sucking shallowly through his clenched teeth.
“Damn well needed it, though,” Shelton replied, his lazy Louisiana serenity strung through with a sharper edge of agitation. He turned his attention pointedly to the corpsman, jerking a thumb over his shoulder to where Eugene was slumped miserably against the tent’s siding. “You a bettin’ man, doc? ‘Cause I got five dollars says his fool ass got malaria.”
“No deal,” the corpsman responded wryly, shooting Shelton a smirk past the gleaming glass oblongs of his spectacles. For just a second, in the sticky dim of the aid tent, Eugene would swear that the man was Doc Caswell. He brightened for a moment, pleased and surprised to see his old friend, but in the next breath the corpsman snorted to himself and straightened up and it became immediately obvious that the dark hair and eyewear were the only similarities between the two. His smile was wider than Caswell’s but stiffer, his interest in them perfunctory rather than sincere. He gamely played along with Shelton anyway. “I’m not losing five bucks to some Gyrene that couldn’t remember his atabrine.”
“I’ve been takin’ - my goddamn - atabrine,” Eugene wheezed sourly. “One every mornin’ - with chow.”
“‘Cept today,” Shelton provided.
“Why didn’t he take it today?” the corpsman asked, frowning.
“Didn’t make it to chow,” Shelton supplied, leaning his hip against a low stack of crates. He nudged the lid of the topmost box aside and started pawing absently through the contents. “Too busy sawin’ logs and airin’ his gut all over the squad tent.”
The corpsman hummed thoughtfully and stepped into Eugene’s space, peering intently own at him. He took Eugene’s chin gently in his fingers and tilted it this way and that, frowning as Eugene blinked sluggishly and moved a half-beat too slow to keep up with his nudged directions. He tugged at the tender skin beneath Eugene’s eye with the pad of his thumb and fished a small penlight out of his breast pocket.
“Look here,” he instructed, holding a finger up in the air.
Eugene obligingly did his best, staring with as much focus as he could muster at the invisible spot where the corpsman’s finger had been while the man angled his penlight into first one eye then the other.
The corpsman hummed again, sounding distinctly disapproving, and abandoned his grip on Eugene’s chin to tug his nearest hand—the left—up by the wrist. He clicked his tongue when he noticed the angry, wet sore festering just past Eugene’s knuckles and tapped gently at the irritated skin rippling out around it. “When’s the last time you had this drained?”
“What? Oh.” Eugene frowned, brow knitting as he tried in vain to remember. He shook his head, sucking a hiccuping breath when the motion set off another nauseating wave of dizziness. “D’no. Week ago? Maybe two?”
The corpsman huffed through his nose, flipped Eugene’s arm over, and curled his fingers tightly over Eugene’s wrist. He was silent for a few long seconds, head tilted as though he was listening for something and lips moving in tiny little twitches while he counted out the rate of Eugene’s pulse.
“Mmmhm,” he sighed satisfactorily, giving a decisive nod and letting Eugene’s arm fall unceremoniously back to his lap.
The corpsman turned without a word toward a narrow wooden table that was positively riddled with all manner of medical implements and started digging through the mess—bottles in various shapes and shades, most of their labels at least half-rotted away by the humidity saturating the jungle air; forceps and blades in an array of sizes, laid out carefully atop a series of clean linen towels; rolls of gauze and prepackaged bandages and what seemed like a hundred little spools of tape. The jumbled display was not altogether unlike some of the curio shops Eugene’s mother occasionally liked to visit back in Mobile.
After a moment’s searching, the corpsman unearthed a rectangular metal container and demanded over his shoulder, “When’s the last time you took a piss?”
Shelton snorted and Eugene blinked, opening his mouth to reply. He shut it again when he realized that he couldn’t quite recall, sheepishly mumbling as much while the corpsman nodded like this was precisely the response he had been expecting.
“Well, marine, you were right to bring him down here,” he said genially, turning and raising his eyebrows at Shelton, who was still making a general nuisance of himself messing about with the crateful of supplies.
He glanced up curiously when the corpsman addressed him, a cigarette bobbing slackly at the corner of his mouth. It remained unlit, presumably in deference to their current surroundings, which was more restraint than Shelton could usually be bothered with. Eugene wondered vaguely why he was even still here. Surely he had better things to do than play spectator to the shame of Eugene’s infirmity. Although, he considered darkly, it was no great secret that by Shelton’s measure, there was little grander entertainment than to watch another man squirm.
“I’ll take that five dollars, if you’re still feeling lucky,” the corpsman offered. The corner of Shelton’s mouth curled into a smirk and he shook his head, reaching up to pluck the cigarette from his lip and gesture toward the corpsman with it.
“Don’t seem fair now you got him all done and figured, doc.”
“Never hurts to try,” the corpsman shrugged amiably. “Now the bad news,” he continued, turning back to Eugene with a markedly more somber expression, “is that you’ve got a case of blood poisoning.” He nodded to the arm he had commandeered a few moments before to take Eugene’s pulse. “That sore on your hand. Good news is, it’s not the worst I’ve ever seen, but it still needs healing up.” He had that metal container tucked under one arm and a scalpel in his opposite hand, blade glinting dully in the shade as he wagged it back and forth. “I’m going to lance the sore and then we’ll soak your hand awhile to draw out the infection, get you some aspirin to help with the fever and chills, alright?”
“Alright,” Eugene echoed dazedly.
“Told you to keep your shit dry, Sledgehammer,” Shelton chided unhelpfully. Eugene turned to glare at him, but his smirk only sharpened under the attention. He tucked a hand into the pocket of his dungarees and came up with his battered old flip lighter, striking the unreliable little silver square against the heel of his hand a few times and swearing when it refused to do more than spit out a few pitiful showers of sparks.
“You don’t need to stick around for this,” the corpsman offered as he busied himself preparing for Eugene’s treatment. Blood poisoning. Christ. “It’s gonna be a minute.”
Shelton, who had ducked his head to puff hopefully at one end of his cigarette while he pressed the other against burst after burst of fizzling sparks, made a soft noise of acknowledgement. When he came back up, it was with a hot orange cherry winking miraculously at the end of his cigarette and a cottony plume of clean white smoke trickling lazily over his teeth.
“Wha’d’ya say, Sledgehammer?” he asked with a long, slow grin, eyes hooded and moss-dark in the murky shade of the tent. “You want me to stay with you? Pet your hair, like? Maybe hold your hand?”
The glower Eugene leveled at him could have stripped the paint off an M3 at six-hundred yards. It was no use pointing out that Shelton had been doing almost exactly that not thirty minutes earlier, without invitation or complaint. A pang of morbid humor flickered through him at the thought of announcing to the corpsman just how tenderly Shelton had fretted, mopping Eugene’s brow and rubbing his back and murmuring sweetly while he shivered and retched.
It might be worth risking the court-martial to see the way Shelton’s wide pale eyes would narrow in his face, the way his warm brown complexion would blanche.
In the end, Eugene made a rude gesture in Shelton’s direction and was content to let that do his speaking for him. Shelton flashed him a wink in response and meandered out with a casual wave of his fingers, sniggering under his breath and radiating all the smug satisfaction of a cat recently feasted on the much coveted canary.
Without Shelton there to engage him, the corpsman seemed inclined to work in brisk, competent silence, which was a minor blessing, considering that Eugene was fairly certain he had recently heaved up every last ounce of genteel sociability that hadn’t already been bled out of him under the demon glow of a Japanese artillery flare. He gritted his teeth against a hiss as the corpsman first lanced his sore but grew quickly accustomed to the rhythm—careful, confident cuts interspersed with periodic applications of gauze over the infected area to soak up the runoff. It took longer than Eugene expected, or maybe the unspooling ribbon of time in Eugene’s fevered perception hadn’t quite straightened itself out just yet.
His head was still pulsing, though the aspirin helped, and the soak was downright heavenly. It stung a little, at first, the hot water prickling against his skin, but the faintly milky solution soothed the itch nearly as soon as it started and the dull ache in his hand—which Eugene hadn’t even noticed until now—bled away just as surely as the heat.
The corpsman occupied himself bustling about on other business while Eugene sat for a long while submerged up to his elbow in the rectangular canister. He took a slow breath in through his nose and sighed it out through his mouth, shoulders unclenching and spine going lax the same way it did whenever he indulged in a bath back home, sinking bonelessly into the vast porcelain clawfoot tub that dominated the guest bathroom on the second floor.
By the time the corpsman was readying him to go—arm trussed up in a sling and under strict order to return in three short hours for another soaking—Eugene felt certain that he was no longer in danger of tumbling down onto his face without Shelton there to prop him up, which made it all the more irritating to discover the man himself loitering suspiciously just outside the tent with an impressive collection of cigarette butts amassed at his feet.
“Have you been standin’ there this whole time?” Eugene demanded, more cussedly than was probably wise, considering the way Shelton seemed generally predisposed to strike up against every sore temper he came across with all the furious combustibility of a particularly volatile match-head.
This time, Shelton simply shrugged, pinching the cherry out of his cigarette and flicking the butt placidly into the dirt alongside all the others.
“No duty today,” he supplied obliquely. “Thought I might walk you back.”
“Yeah?” Eugene snorted, stalking pointedly past him. “You wanna carry my books too?”
“I’d offer, cher,” Shelton drawled, falling into step just behind Eugene’s shoulder. Eugene didn’t even need to look to know that he was grinning. “Only you never let that scrappy little Bible outta your sight. Surprised the damn thing ain’t disintegrated yet, what with you weepin’ into it all the time.” He scurried forward, turning on his heel when he was a few solid strides ahead of Euguene. He brought his hands up to his face, sweeping false tears off his cheeks as he danced backward, bawling dramatically, “Oh Lawd, let all the Nips be near-sighted! Oh Lawd, let all they rifles jam!”
“Shut up,” Eugene snarled. He made to dart around Shelton, but he was far from operating at peak capacity and Shelton had always been a speedy son of a bitch, besides. He blocked Eugene’s path easily, lip curling up off his grin and distorting it into a delighted sneer, twisted with the slightly manic glee that surfaced in Shelton whenever he successfully managed to burrow under Eugene’s skin.
“Oh Lawd!” Shelton wailed, loud enough that a few of the Marines dotting the coconut-lined avenue started to laugh and holler and whistle as they passed. “Don’t let my fool ass die of blood poisonin’! Please, Lawd! Deliver me from my own damn laziness!”
“Shut up, Snafu!” Eugene spat, and reached forward to shove at Shelton’s chest with his good arm. Shelton stumbled back, but he was laughing, teeth bared and pale eyes glittering with mirth.
“Careful there, Genie,” he teased, strolling confidently backwards without bothering to look where he was going. A little, forgotten coal flickered bright in Eugene’s belly at the unexpected nickname and his face flooded with a familiar, tingling heat. Shelton’s grin sprawled broad and sharp and white. “You go pickin’ fights, you liable to need another visit with the corpsman, an’ I ain’t draggin’ your ass down there again.”
“Didn’t ask you to the first time,” Eugene grumbled, and grudgingly followed Shelton as he picked his way back up the hill toward their squad tent. The sun blazed low across the horizon, bleeding waves of pink and orange out into the slowly darkening sky and licking hot over Eugene’s shoulders, the back of his neck. He felt wrung out, like a piece of washing that had been scoured and twisted and beaten mercilessly in the hope of scrubbing out a particularly stubborn stain.
“Did it anyway, didn’t I, cher?” Shelton grinned, and ducked into the tent with little fanfare. From inside, he called jeeringly, “‘sides, what’d Missus Sledge say if she saw you bein’ so ungrateful?”
“She’d probably tell me to keep it up. That you deserve a good, hard knock about the head,” Eugene replied sourly and stepped in after him. He stumbled at the threshold, a shallow wave of dizziness rolling through him, and only didn’t go sprawling into the dirt because Shelton was somehow suddenly there, one hand grasping hard at Eugene’s good arm and the other fisted tight over the back of his sweat-drenched dungarees.
“Easy now, Sledgehammer. No need to go throwin’ yourself around like some boot can’t handle his liquor.” He loosed his grip on Eugene’s elbow and transferred the hand he had on Eugene’s pants to settle around the curve of his waist. “Let’s get you settled ‘fore you do yourself any real damage throwin’ that tantrum you seem so keen on.”
“You dropped me on the floor,” Eugene scoffed. Shelton rolled his eyes and deposited Eugene none too graciously on the narrow frame of his rack.
“Picked you back up right after,” he riposted breezily. “Got you movin’, anyhow, and that was the whole point. You’da sat here all goddamn day gettin’ that shit in your blood if I hadn’t and I ain’t heard you thank me yet.” Eugene scowled and Shelton’s mouth quirked, amused by Eugene’s irritation and bull-headedly confident in his own superiority, as always. He pointed to something just past Eugene’s shoulder and announced, “Water’s over there. Doc says you gotta keep hydrated.”
Eugene turned to discover not one but two canteens tucked neatly onto the stacked wooden ammo crates—empty, of course—that he had put to service as a makeshift nightstand. They were lined up primly beside the reappropriated Japanese rubber document bag he used to house his Bible and his notes and all his covetously scrounged pencil stubs. Shelton must have gone and filled them both while Eugene was suffering through treatment down at the aid station.
“That yours?” he asked, brow furrowed, gesturing to the second canteen, still in its button-flapped canvas casing. Shelton shrugged.
“Ain’t usin’ it,” he replied. He was standing near enough that it was only a matter of shifting his weight to knock one of his knees gently into one of Eugene’s. “You gonna lie down now, Genie, or you waitin’ on me to tuck you in?”
That little ember in Eugene’s belly hissed and sparked, the entirety of his abdomen coming alive with a fluttering wave of warmth that hummed up through his skin like a buzzing swarm. He didn’t understand why Shelton appeared to have suddenly changed his tune again, though he was sure that the clues were likely all there.
The dim ache stubbornly rooted in Eugene’s temples made the simple act of seeing a thought through to its end as fruitless as catching water in a sieve, otherwise he might have been able to puzzle it out on his own. As it was, he felt seconds from keeling over and succumbing to the deep-seated exhaustion that seemed to saturate his every pore. He was in no mood to play Shelton’s games.
“Why’re you doin’ all this?”
It took Eugene a second to realize that he was the one who had barked the demand into the muggy air. It hung there for a second, stuck between the two of them like a mayfly freshly caught in tar paper, wiggling and thrashing and so pitiful to look at that it made a man’s stomach twist. Eugene swallowed, so thick his throat may well have been coated with molasses, and grimly met Shelton’s gaze.
Shelton watched him for a long second, eyes wide under his thoughtfully furrowed brow. He licked shallowly at his bottom lip and then tucked it up under his teeth, chewing at it for a second before he asked, quiet and careful, “All what?”
The heat in Eugene’s belly cooled and curdled, gut churning sickly while his pallid cheeks flared through with shame and disappointment. He huffed a thin, furious breath and shook his head, rolling his eyes heavenward. It broke the strange tension that had slowly started to fill the room like steam rising up off the sodden jungle floor and yielded the unexpected reward of making Shelton flinch.
“Forget it,” Eugene muttered sharply, flopping down onto his good side. It was impossible to put his back to Shelton without taking the sling off, so he settled for curling his knees up toward his belly and aggressively folding his pillow in half before he shoved it between his neck and shoulder. “Thanks for the water,” he said, pointedly closing his eyes. “You can go.”
For a long moment the only sound in the tent was the steady rhythm of Eugene’s breath, still thready and shallower than it should be, though the corpsman had promised that would fade. He kept his eyes screwed shut tight and focused on breathing slowly through his mouth, trying to force his lungs fuller and fuller with every low gasp despite the vice-like band that had settled into place around his ribs courtesy the infection in his blood. He startled when the canvas of his cot suddenly dipped and blinked up to discover Shelton perching awkwardly at the edge.
He had another cigarette in his mouth and his gaze fixed absently on the lighter he was fidgeting with, both his hands together between his knees. While Eugene watched him, Shelton sighed through his nose and reached up to scratch at one of his eyebrows with a thumb.
“Snafu, what - ” Eugene started cautiously, but Shelton cut him off with a little shake of his head, a lazy sweep of his hand through the air.
He sat there for a long minute, worrying over some thought or maybe rallying his courage, until he finally flicked a quick, darting glance over at Eugene and offered benignly around his cigarette, “I meant what I said before. Ain’t no place for it, not here.” One side of his mouth tilted up and he jerked his head over his shoulder, presumably gesturing in the vague and imagined direction of America. He rolled his gaze that way, too, adding ruefully, “An’ there sure as shit ain’t no place for it back there.”
Shelton’s knee jiggled nervously and he huffed a soft, bitter laugh through his nose before he turned his eyes back toward Eugene. There was something faintly fevered in them, lighting them from behind like sun-soaked jade. He reached out with a slow, careful hand and pushed Eugene’s hair up off his forehead, a painful parody of the same stilted affection he had allowed himself that morning, when Eugene was too dazed to turn him down.
This time, Eugene stayed carefully, purposefully still, not willing to risk even blinking while Shelton was coiled tight like a bear-trap ready to be sprung.
“Every step we get closer to home, folk gonna have somethin’ worse to say about it,” Shelton explained, fingers hovering tentatively at Eugene’s hairline. His voice was low and brittle in a way Eugene hadn’t heard since they were screaming at each other through the dark, drenched in freezing Okinawan rain while their squadmates slowly unravelled in the muck beside them. Here, in the fading twilight of the sticky coastal evening, Eugene let his eyes slip shut, basking in the heat of Shelton’s palm and the familiarity of his touch.
He swallowed, a distant ember of hope beginning to glow in the dark, lonely chasm that’d been eating at his insides for weeks, and offered hoarsely, “S’pose it’s a good thing we’re headed to China, then.”
When he opened his eyes again Shelton was staring at him, both eyebrows quirked and amusement tugging at the corners of his mouth. He shook his head again and chuckled under his breath, pawing clumsily at Eugene’s hair—half tousling, half petting—until he had his fingers properly tangled in it. Eugene licked at his dry mouth and tried not to squirm as Shelton relaxed back into him, his narrow hips slotting in neatly against Eugene’s stomach.
“Think you missin’ the point, Sledgehammer,” he chided, but he was grinning.
“No, I don’t think I am,” Eugene argued gently. He shifted so that he could nudge the knuckles of his good hand up against Shelton’s knee, palm curled in softly toward him, and pressed their bodies closer still. “I know it ain’t - ” right, he nearly said, catching the word behind his gritted teeth with a small noise of frustration. He worked his jaw for a second, thinking, and corrected quietly, “I know I ain’t gonna be escortin’ you to any cotillions back stateside, Snaf. I ain’t ever been interested in all that, anyway.”
“Shame,” Shelton teased, petting fondly at Eugene’s hair and letting his knees splay a little wider, leaning into Eugene’s touch. “I look damn fine in a dress.”
Eugene rolled his eyes and Shelton laughed again, softly. His mirth was still barbed but so much sweeter without the finely honed knife-edge of cruelty that had warped it over these last miserable weeks, forging it into more weapon than honest expression. God, how Eugene had missed the sound.
“Ain’t no place for it,” Shelton repeated absently, gaze roving almost drunkenly over Eugene’s face. Eugene blinked up at him.
“But?” he offered, voice small and hopeful.
Shelton’s eyes snapped to his immediately and held there for a frozen moment, hunted and haunted and hooded with want. He sighed, low and long, and tightened his fingers in Eugene’s hair nearly tight enough to sting, grasping for just a second before he gave it a gentle little tug.
“But,” he echoed, and Eugene couldn’t bite back the smile that bloomed across his face. He was sure that he’d gone embarrassingly pink, but Shelton just smirked down at him and clicked his tongue. “But,” he repeated, a little louder, “now I seen how poorly you take care of yourself without me around to keep an eye on you, I’m thinkin’ it might be safer for the both of us if I stick close.”
“Right,” Eugene agreed, shifting a little further onto his back and hooking the fingers of his good hand casually over the hem of Shelton’s nearest pocket. “Safer.” He pressed his teeth into his lower lip and asked with as much politely affected Alabama naivete as he could muster, “How close were you thinkin’ you might stick, exactly?”
Shelton, catching onto the game immediately, canted his head thoughtfully back and forth.
“Dunno,” he drawled, curling his free hand over the frame of the rack up near Eugene’s head. He leaned forward so that he was poised over top of Eugene, smirking down with all the sly self-assurance that had ensnared Eugene’s attention so thoroughly in the first place all those months before. There was still a good foot or so of space between them, but Eugene could see each one of Shelton’s barely-there freckles, every bristle in the fan of dark lashes that swept fetchingly down over his color-shifting eyes. “‘Bout here?”
Eugene shook his head a little, hair rasping against his pillow, against the canvas cot.
“No?” Shelton clarified, amused. His lush mouth tilted up into a grin, corners gone soft with promise. “Well, cher,” he drawled, voice curling low and warm and sweet through the pit of Eugene’s belly, “where d’you want me?”
“Here,” Eugene breathed, reaching up to clutch at Shelton’s undershirt and pull him in until their mouths brushed. He felt it when Shelton smiled and his heart trembled in his chest at the familiar sensation, pulse roaring in his ears so loud he almost couldn’t hear himself when he murmured, “Just here.”
He was dizzy again for awhile after that, but this time there was no need to bother the corpsman about it.
Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge
“Think you can stand for me?”
It seemed a peculiar question to Eugene’s feverishly wheeling mind, so he cracked an eye up at Shelton—who was frowning handsomely down at him, looking good enough to kiss despite his sweat-stained undershirt and dirt-streaked face, hair slightly matted from a few days’ lack of shower—and sighed exhaustedly, “Why?”
“Gotta get you down to the aid station,” Shelton explained. His hand was still resting possessively on Eugene’s back, his touch astonishingly tender against Eugene’s clammy, goose-pimpled skin. “Can’t have you dyin’ all alone in your rack a week before we ship outta this shithole for good, an’ that putain de docteur on duty got himself so busy with some inventory checklist he can’t be bothered with a house call.”
“Ain’t dyin’,” Eugene mumbled contrarily.
“Might could be,” Shelton shot back.
Author's Note: Written for
hc_bingo , with only extremely surface-level research into period-accurate medical procedures and rushed along anyway because I just wanted to get it done, dammit. Follows along with show canon, where Snafu goes with Sledge and—presumably—the rest of K Company to do occupation duty in China, but borrows the bit about blood poisoning and the "hot soak" treatment from the actual canon of Sledge's book "China Marine."This my first foray into writing these two, and I sincerely hope that I did them justice. Many thanks to
scandalinbohemia for the quick-pass and suggestions, which made this fic roughly six thousand times better and several hundred words shorter. You are a gem.You can also read it over on AO3.
Eugene was roused from the fitful half-doze he’d only just managed to grasp onto a few short hours earlier by the feeling of a cool palm curling over his sweat-beaded forehead. He whimpered as another shiver wracked through him, trembling all the way out to his fingertips, and fought to open his sore eyes.
There was a nondescript pillar of Marine khaki standing in front of him. Eugene followed the dizzy, bleary line of his gaze until it finally meandered up far enough to land on the hovering smudge of Shelton’s face.
“Sledgehammer?” Shelton said, low and concerned, a shallow divot dimpling the line of his brow. “You don’t look so good.”
Eugene huffed as much of a laugh as he could manage—a pitiful little scrap of mirth that barely made it past his teeth—and tried weakly to wet his lips without much success.
“M’fine,” he murmured. His voice was scraped raw, tone brittle and thin, catching rough in his throat like it did whenever he had the flu. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had any water. His canteen had run dry sometime in the gauzy twilit hours of the previous evening and Eugene had been too exhausted to get up and refill it.
Shelton frowned down at him, maybe for just a second, maybe for a whole ten minutes. Eugene couldn’t really be sure—time seemed to be moving in fits and starts, streaking past at roaring P-39 speeds that left him reeling in their slipstream or else crawling along so thick and taffy-slow that it made him ache to try and wade through it. All he was really sure of was the steady sweep of Shelton’s thumb across his hairline, blessedly cool against his skin.
“Been takin’ your atabrine?” Shelton asked eventually.
Eugene nodded, another shudder rattling its way up from his feet, and confirmed drowsily, “Ev’ryday.”
Shelton made a small, dissatisfied noise above him. His thumb was careful and tender where it dragged lightly across Eugene’s temple, traced down around the curve of his ear. Eugene’s stomach twisted at the sensation, cramping with the sudden force of his longing. He curled into himself like a pill-bug to keep from doing anything foolish, like reaching out and grabbing dumbly at Shelton’s narrow hips.
Shelton sighed and brushed the sweat-soaked fringe up off of Eugene’s forehead, pressing skeptically, “You sure ‘bout that, boo?”
“Didn’ w-wanna get ma-ma-malaria,” Eugene assured him, shivering with enough force that it shook a stutter into his words. His teeth had been chattering so loud and long that his jaw felt bruised from the tension. It was a miracle he hadn’t woken anybody sooner, reduced as he was to this quivering puddle of human misery.
“Well, you come down with somethin’, cher,” Shelton observed. He let his hand slide down to cup Eugene’s cheek and for an insane moment Eugene was possessed of the sharp desire to turn his face and press a kiss to it.
He rolled over into his pillow instead, pushing his heat-flushed cheek into the fabric and twisting his fingers against his cot. Shelton followed the motion of his body as he turned, hand skimming down to land possessively at the base of his neck. Eugene whimpered at the familiar weight and tried to shy away, but Shelton either didn’t notice or decided not to let him. The easy intimacy of the gesture made his head spin even faster and kicked the low pulse in his temples up to an angry throbbing.
He’d thought they weren’t doing this anymore—they were well out of the jungle now, at least by a given definition, and Shelton had made it abundantly clear that he’d only take a hand from the likes of Eugene if they were stuck on some tropical hellscape with the threat of death hanging dark and constant over their heads.
“No place for it among civilized men,” he had explained with a lazy shrug some months before, when Eugene leaned in to kiss him in the cozy darkness of their squad tent, dizzy with relief for having survived Peleliu and hoping to celebrate now they had some time and the relative privacy to use it. Shelton’s bayou drawl had run cool with the same flippant remove he’d wielded against Eugene and the rest of the new boots that first day on Pavuvu, a blunt-edged cruelty that had left them all feeling unsettled and unwanted from the moment they marched ashore. It was jarring to hear it again after so many weeks tucked tight together in a filthy foxhole, with Shelton’s low, amused voice coiling against his cheek and his breath the only warmth for miles, but Eugene knew better than to overstep a man’s boundaries, particularly in matters like this.
The game changed again, without notice or explanation, when they were shipped out into the choking jungles of Okinawa. While Eugene hadn’t been too proud to turn away from Shelton’s questing fingers when they slipped under his dungarees in the mud and the cold and the rain, he had been cautiously keeping his distance since they crawled back off those impenetrable ridges, trying his best to respect whatever strange, impermeable rules governed Shelton’s singularly mind-bending approach to intimacy.
Shelton, it seemed, shared no similar compunction toward propriety. He sighed again and traced his calloused palm all the way down Eugene’s bare, sweat-slick back to rest in the dip above his waist with a casual confidence that made Eugene’s throat tighten and his heart pound. He trembled under Shelton’s hand, panting thinly into the stretched canvas cot. Every breath was hot and musty with salt, coral dust and island sand combining to coat his tongue in a layer of fine grit.
Eugene screwed his eyes shut and moaned miserably, “Snaf.”
“Right here, Genie,” Shelton murmured in response, so quiet that Eugene suspected he wasn’t really meant to have heard. The diminutive sent a shiver of an entirely different stripe dancing down Eugene’s spine. Shelton, no doubt mistaking this for a tremor of the same wretched discomfort he had seen so strongly in evidence thus far, stroked Eugene’s side in a long, slow sweep.
“Think you can stand for me?”
It seemed a peculiar question to Eugene’s feverishly wheeling mind, so he cracked an eye up at Shelton—who was frowning handsomely down at him, looking good enough to kiss despite his sweat-stained undershirt and dirt-streaked face, hair slightly matted from a few days’ lack of shower—and sighed exhaustedly, “Why?”
“Gotta get you down to the aid station,” Shelton explained. His hand was still resting possessively on Eugene’s back, his touch astonishingly tender against Eugene’s clammy, goose-pimpled skin. “Can’t have you dyin’ all alone in your rack a week before we ship outta this shithole for good, an’ that putain de docteur on duty got himself so busy with some inventory checklist he can’t be bothered with a house call.”
“Ain’t dyin’,” Eugene mumbled contrarily, mind latching onto the only part of that honey-slow missive that made any sense.
“Might could be,” Shelton shot back. He nudged at Eugene’s side and cupped his other hand over Eugene’s elbow, trying ineffectually to guide him up from both angles. “C’mon now, Sledgehammer,” he coaxed. The soft lilt of his voice made Eugene’s stomach twist and dip, rocking as a ship unmoored. “What am I s’posed to write Missus Sledge if you buy it now, huh? She gonna believe me when I say her darlin’ baby boy died ‘cause he was too much a stubborn fool to get his ass carted down to the corpsman?”
“Probably,” Eugene agreed hazily, mouth half-buried in the lumpy mass of his pillow. He could feel his pulse in his temples and in his wrists. It was thrumming so fast, like the frantic winging of a hummingbird, the frenzied tremolo of a drumroll in some swinging jazz number. Eugene considered vaguely that he might throw up. “She kn-knows what m’ like.”
“Yeah, well, so do I,” Shelton muttered irritably, and reached underneath Eugene to wrap his hands around the cot’s metal frame. He tipped the whole thing, hefting it just high enough to dump Eugene ignominiously to the sand with a strangled yelp—no small feat considering that Eugene was very slightly larger than Shelton’s own modest frame and, in his current half-broiled state, as good as deadweight, besides.
Perhaps Eugene would be duly impressed after he managed to recover his breath, when his head didn’t feel quite so much like it was swimming in bright, booze-soaked cotton and being pounded with a rubber mallet.
“Up you come, Sledge,” Shelton instructed unsympathetically, hooking his elbows under Eugene’s armpits and making to haul him forcibly to his feet.
Eugene made a clumsy attempt to cooperate but his knees went to water beneath him, depositing him none too kindly straight back into the dirt. The ground tilted, lurching up toward his face for a teetering moment before dropping suddenly away again, and Eugene’s stomach rolled with it. He hunched forward, gripping at the sand so tightly that it rushed in thick white streams up between his fingers.
“Gene?” Shelton asked, hand fluttering down the line of Eugene’s back, which had gone strung suddenly taut.
Eugene opened his mouth to warn Shelton that he might want to take a step back but only succeeded in upturning his stomach all over the downy sands and the scattered tufts of scrub grass.
“Shit,” Shelton sighed, rubbing a hand in slow, steady strokes across Eugene’s shoulders while he retched and heaved.
There was nothing much to come up—Eugene hadn’t made it to chow since the morning of the day before—but it still seemed that he was locked there forever, trapped in a moment of eternal punishment like some tragic Greek hero with his stomach clenching against his will while his throat constricted and burned. When he finally finished his eyes were stinging, arms trembling and threatening to give under his own weight. He gasped a thick, glutinous breath and spat between his hands.
“That’s it, cher,” Shelton was encouraging gently from somewhere above him, still petting at his shoulders. “Let it all out, now.”
“Fuck,” Eugene croaked, squeezing his eyes shut against the hot press of tears. He flinched when Shelton smoothed a thumb from the nape of his neck down to where his spine dipped between his shoulder blades and pointedly shrugged Shelton’s hand off, breathing shallowly through his mouth and demanding weakly, “The hell’d you do that for?”
“Hadda get you on your feet somehow,” Shelton replied with his usual air of amused disaffection. He shuffled around behind Eugene for a moment, digging through the various belongings strewn haphazardly around the tent and making soft, dismissive noises under his breath until he came up with a slightly battered canteen. He knelt back down at Eugene’s side and tilted it enticingly back and forth. “Here,” he said, while the water sloshed lazily. “Hit of this oughta help.”
Eugene settled carefully back on his heels, reaching out to accept the canteen with shaking fingers. He swilled the first sip around in his mouth a few times, chasing the acid tang from between his teeth, and spat it out before availing himself of another few small, careful mouthfuls. The water was tepid verging on warm and tasted bitterly metallic with the residue of an iodine tablet, but it soothed Eugene’s aching throat and settled calmly enough in his sore stomach.
“Thanks,” he murmured when he felt sufficiently sated, handing the canteen back over.
Shelton nodded and screwed the cap on before tossing it to settle awkwardly on its side against Eugene’s much-abused pillow. He pushed himself to his feet and brushed his palms across his thighs, kicking up little clouds of dust off his sand-encrusted dungarees.
“You ready to see the corpsman now?” he asked, extending a hand with a smirk. Eugene suspected that rolling his eyes would only see him emptying his belly into the dirt for a second time, so he settled for glaring darkly up at Shelton as he let himself be hauled to his feet.
“What’re you doin’ up so early anyway?” Eugene asked rudely while Shelton situated their bodies against one another to his own satisfaction—one arm around Eugene’s back and the other clamped tightly to Eugene’s wrist where he’d slung an arm over Shelton’s shoulders in turn.
“Sledgehammer,” Shelton said slowly, mouth pursed into a frown, “it’s four o’clock.”
“What?” Eugene frowned, bewildered and incredulous, as Shelton urged him into a controlled stagger toward the flap at the front of the tent. “I ain’t slept that long since I was back in Mobile.”
Shelton snorted. “Did today, boo.”
Eugene stared at him for a long, baffled second, and demanded stupidly, “How?”
“Dunno,” Shelton shrugged, shaking his head with a smirk. “Tried to get you up for chow this mornin’, but you weren’t havin’ none of it. Had a mind to let you sleep ‘til you was feelin’ better, only I come to check on you just now and found you lyin’ there lookin’ whiter’n maggots on rice.” The humor faded from his face and he turned his pale eyes on Eugene with a heavy, reserved wariness that Eugene couldn’t quite place. “Figured it was ‘bout time to drag you down and let the Navy boys fix you up, since you don’t seem too keen on seein’ to it yourself.”
He eased Eugene out through the tent’s opening, mumbling encouragements when Eugene whimpered and closed his eyes against the fierce yellow glare of the late afternoon sun.
“Fuck,” he breathed weakly. “‘S hot.”
“Always is,” Shelton agreed, giving Eugene’s shoulder a soft, subtle squeeze. “Ain’t got too far to go, now, Sledgehammer. Just keep slidin’ one foot in front of the other, just like that. Won’t go breakin’ any land speed records, but it’ll be miracle enough you keep movin’.”
“Snafu?” Eugene gritted furiously past his clenched teeth, squinting one eye open just wide enough to make out the bleary impression of the ground in front of him as he trundled slowly forward. “Shut the hell up.”
“You a mean ol’ bobcat when y’sick, ain’tcha Sledge?” Shelton crooned, ignoring him and sounding positively delighted by the unexpected discovery of this character flaw, besides. “Better light a candle for whatever poor, unsuspectin’ Alabama sweetheart you pin down back home, boy. Somebody gotta warn her she gon’ be wrasslin’ a wild animal the minute you got so much as a sniffle.”
“Fuck off,” Eugene snapped. Something cold and unpleasant dropped into the pit of his gut to hear Shelton joking that way, though he supposed it was no great surprise that his bedside manner left much to be desired. Eugene would have gladly shoved him over into the dirt if such action wouldn’t have toppled Eugene onto his ass right alongside him.
He was properly shaking now, rattling in Shelton’s grip harder than the recoil off one of the .30 caliber machine guns. His entire body felt soaked through with heat and sweat, skin prickling and joints aching. Eugene wondered at the spectacle he must make, panting like a dog while Shelton, of all people, guided his trembling form down the narrow gravel lane. He was distantly aware of familiar voices calling out to them, fellow Marines barraging Shelton with questions about Eugene’s wellbeing and only half-feigning horror as to his current condition. He left it to Shelton to holler amiably back—much as it annoyed him, he was in no fit state to answer on his own behalf.
By the time they stumbled into the aid station, Eugene was gasping like he’d just finished a marathon, body juddering fit to shake apart. He had shifted a little more of his weight onto Shelton’s shoulders with every quavering step and was forced to admit, to the great detriment of his personal pride, that he remained vertical almost solely by the virtue of Shelton’s support.
“Bring him on in,” drawled the corpsman on duty without looking up from the clipboard he had in hand.
There was a series of shadowed figures lying despondently on a row of racks against the tent’s far wall, poor bastards awaiting proper medical evacuation for some grievous wounds or persistent illnesses. Eugene squinted blearily over while one of them shifted and sighed a quiet moan into the gloom.
The corpsman raised a hand without looking and pointed at something on Shelton’s other side, instructing briskly, “Set him there.”
Shelton nodded and dragged Eugene slowly over to a canvas folding chair propped unobtrusively in the corner, where he shrugged him off with all the tender care one might afford a wildly cumbersome and particularly heavy seabag.
“Goddamn, Sledgehammer,” he grumbled, pressing both hands to his lower back and stretching his chest up toward the ceiling while Eugene sat wheezing and glaring and trying to catch the breath that felt like it had been knocked out of him. “For a fella can’t keep his food down you heavier’n a box full of fuckin’ M69 rounds.”
“Didn’t - ask you - f’r help,” Eugene said thinly, sentiment punctured by the intermittent gasps he couldn’t help sucking shallowly through his clenched teeth.
“Damn well needed it, though,” Shelton replied, his lazy Louisiana serenity strung through with a sharper edge of agitation. He turned his attention pointedly to the corpsman, jerking a thumb over his shoulder to where Eugene was slumped miserably against the tent’s siding. “You a bettin’ man, doc? ‘Cause I got five dollars says his fool ass got malaria.”
“No deal,” the corpsman responded wryly, shooting Shelton a smirk past the gleaming glass oblongs of his spectacles. For just a second, in the sticky dim of the aid tent, Eugene would swear that the man was Doc Caswell. He brightened for a moment, pleased and surprised to see his old friend, but in the next breath the corpsman snorted to himself and straightened up and it became immediately obvious that the dark hair and eyewear were the only similarities between the two. His smile was wider than Caswell’s but stiffer, his interest in them perfunctory rather than sincere. He gamely played along with Shelton anyway. “I’m not losing five bucks to some Gyrene that couldn’t remember his atabrine.”
“I’ve been takin’ - my goddamn - atabrine,” Eugene wheezed sourly. “One every mornin’ - with chow.”
“‘Cept today,” Shelton provided.
“Why didn’t he take it today?” the corpsman asked, frowning.
“Didn’t make it to chow,” Shelton supplied, leaning his hip against a low stack of crates. He nudged the lid of the topmost box aside and started pawing absently through the contents. “Too busy sawin’ logs and airin’ his gut all over the squad tent.”
The corpsman hummed thoughtfully and stepped into Eugene’s space, peering intently own at him. He took Eugene’s chin gently in his fingers and tilted it this way and that, frowning as Eugene blinked sluggishly and moved a half-beat too slow to keep up with his nudged directions. He tugged at the tender skin beneath Eugene’s eye with the pad of his thumb and fished a small penlight out of his breast pocket.
“Look here,” he instructed, holding a finger up in the air.
Eugene obligingly did his best, staring with as much focus as he could muster at the invisible spot where the corpsman’s finger had been while the man angled his penlight into first one eye then the other.
The corpsman hummed again, sounding distinctly disapproving, and abandoned his grip on Eugene’s chin to tug his nearest hand—the left—up by the wrist. He clicked his tongue when he noticed the angry, wet sore festering just past Eugene’s knuckles and tapped gently at the irritated skin rippling out around it. “When’s the last time you had this drained?”
“What? Oh.” Eugene frowned, brow knitting as he tried in vain to remember. He shook his head, sucking a hiccuping breath when the motion set off another nauseating wave of dizziness. “D’no. Week ago? Maybe two?”
The corpsman huffed through his nose, flipped Eugene’s arm over, and curled his fingers tightly over Eugene’s wrist. He was silent for a few long seconds, head tilted as though he was listening for something and lips moving in tiny little twitches while he counted out the rate of Eugene’s pulse.
“Mmmhm,” he sighed satisfactorily, giving a decisive nod and letting Eugene’s arm fall unceremoniously back to his lap.
The corpsman turned without a word toward a narrow wooden table that was positively riddled with all manner of medical implements and started digging through the mess—bottles in various shapes and shades, most of their labels at least half-rotted away by the humidity saturating the jungle air; forceps and blades in an array of sizes, laid out carefully atop a series of clean linen towels; rolls of gauze and prepackaged bandages and what seemed like a hundred little spools of tape. The jumbled display was not altogether unlike some of the curio shops Eugene’s mother occasionally liked to visit back in Mobile.
After a moment’s searching, the corpsman unearthed a rectangular metal container and demanded over his shoulder, “When’s the last time you took a piss?”
Shelton snorted and Eugene blinked, opening his mouth to reply. He shut it again when he realized that he couldn’t quite recall, sheepishly mumbling as much while the corpsman nodded like this was precisely the response he had been expecting.
“Well, marine, you were right to bring him down here,” he said genially, turning and raising his eyebrows at Shelton, who was still making a general nuisance of himself messing about with the crateful of supplies.
He glanced up curiously when the corpsman addressed him, a cigarette bobbing slackly at the corner of his mouth. It remained unlit, presumably in deference to their current surroundings, which was more restraint than Shelton could usually be bothered with. Eugene wondered vaguely why he was even still here. Surely he had better things to do than play spectator to the shame of Eugene’s infirmity. Although, he considered darkly, it was no great secret that by Shelton’s measure, there was little grander entertainment than to watch another man squirm.
“I’ll take that five dollars, if you’re still feeling lucky,” the corpsman offered. The corner of Shelton’s mouth curled into a smirk and he shook his head, reaching up to pluck the cigarette from his lip and gesture toward the corpsman with it.
“Don’t seem fair now you got him all done and figured, doc.”
“Never hurts to try,” the corpsman shrugged amiably. “Now the bad news,” he continued, turning back to Eugene with a markedly more somber expression, “is that you’ve got a case of blood poisoning.” He nodded to the arm he had commandeered a few moments before to take Eugene’s pulse. “That sore on your hand. Good news is, it’s not the worst I’ve ever seen, but it still needs healing up.” He had that metal container tucked under one arm and a scalpel in his opposite hand, blade glinting dully in the shade as he wagged it back and forth. “I’m going to lance the sore and then we’ll soak your hand awhile to draw out the infection, get you some aspirin to help with the fever and chills, alright?”
“Alright,” Eugene echoed dazedly.
“Told you to keep your shit dry, Sledgehammer,” Shelton chided unhelpfully. Eugene turned to glare at him, but his smirk only sharpened under the attention. He tucked a hand into the pocket of his dungarees and came up with his battered old flip lighter, striking the unreliable little silver square against the heel of his hand a few times and swearing when it refused to do more than spit out a few pitiful showers of sparks.
“You don’t need to stick around for this,” the corpsman offered as he busied himself preparing for Eugene’s treatment. Blood poisoning. Christ. “It’s gonna be a minute.”
Shelton, who had ducked his head to puff hopefully at one end of his cigarette while he pressed the other against burst after burst of fizzling sparks, made a soft noise of acknowledgement. When he came back up, it was with a hot orange cherry winking miraculously at the end of his cigarette and a cottony plume of clean white smoke trickling lazily over his teeth.
“Wha’d’ya say, Sledgehammer?” he asked with a long, slow grin, eyes hooded and moss-dark in the murky shade of the tent. “You want me to stay with you? Pet your hair, like? Maybe hold your hand?”
The glower Eugene leveled at him could have stripped the paint off an M3 at six-hundred yards. It was no use pointing out that Shelton had been doing almost exactly that not thirty minutes earlier, without invitation or complaint. A pang of morbid humor flickered through him at the thought of announcing to the corpsman just how tenderly Shelton had fretted, mopping Eugene’s brow and rubbing his back and murmuring sweetly while he shivered and retched.
It might be worth risking the court-martial to see the way Shelton’s wide pale eyes would narrow in his face, the way his warm brown complexion would blanche.
In the end, Eugene made a rude gesture in Shelton’s direction and was content to let that do his speaking for him. Shelton flashed him a wink in response and meandered out with a casual wave of his fingers, sniggering under his breath and radiating all the smug satisfaction of a cat recently feasted on the much coveted canary.
Without Shelton there to engage him, the corpsman seemed inclined to work in brisk, competent silence, which was a minor blessing, considering that Eugene was fairly certain he had recently heaved up every last ounce of genteel sociability that hadn’t already been bled out of him under the demon glow of a Japanese artillery flare. He gritted his teeth against a hiss as the corpsman first lanced his sore but grew quickly accustomed to the rhythm—careful, confident cuts interspersed with periodic applications of gauze over the infected area to soak up the runoff. It took longer than Eugene expected, or maybe the unspooling ribbon of time in Eugene’s fevered perception hadn’t quite straightened itself out just yet.
His head was still pulsing, though the aspirin helped, and the soak was downright heavenly. It stung a little, at first, the hot water prickling against his skin, but the faintly milky solution soothed the itch nearly as soon as it started and the dull ache in his hand—which Eugene hadn’t even noticed until now—bled away just as surely as the heat.
The corpsman occupied himself bustling about on other business while Eugene sat for a long while submerged up to his elbow in the rectangular canister. He took a slow breath in through his nose and sighed it out through his mouth, shoulders unclenching and spine going lax the same way it did whenever he indulged in a bath back home, sinking bonelessly into the vast porcelain clawfoot tub that dominated the guest bathroom on the second floor.
By the time the corpsman was readying him to go—arm trussed up in a sling and under strict order to return in three short hours for another soaking—Eugene felt certain that he was no longer in danger of tumbling down onto his face without Shelton there to prop him up, which made it all the more irritating to discover the man himself loitering suspiciously just outside the tent with an impressive collection of cigarette butts amassed at his feet.
“Have you been standin’ there this whole time?” Eugene demanded, more cussedly than was probably wise, considering the way Shelton seemed generally predisposed to strike up against every sore temper he came across with all the furious combustibility of a particularly volatile match-head.
This time, Shelton simply shrugged, pinching the cherry out of his cigarette and flicking the butt placidly into the dirt alongside all the others.
“No duty today,” he supplied obliquely. “Thought I might walk you back.”
“Yeah?” Eugene snorted, stalking pointedly past him. “You wanna carry my books too?”
“I’d offer, cher,” Shelton drawled, falling into step just behind Eugene’s shoulder. Eugene didn’t even need to look to know that he was grinning. “Only you never let that scrappy little Bible outta your sight. Surprised the damn thing ain’t disintegrated yet, what with you weepin’ into it all the time.” He scurried forward, turning on his heel when he was a few solid strides ahead of Euguene. He brought his hands up to his face, sweeping false tears off his cheeks as he danced backward, bawling dramatically, “Oh Lawd, let all the Nips be near-sighted! Oh Lawd, let all they rifles jam!”
“Shut up,” Eugene snarled. He made to dart around Shelton, but he was far from operating at peak capacity and Shelton had always been a speedy son of a bitch, besides. He blocked Eugene’s path easily, lip curling up off his grin and distorting it into a delighted sneer, twisted with the slightly manic glee that surfaced in Shelton whenever he successfully managed to burrow under Eugene’s skin.
“Oh Lawd!” Shelton wailed, loud enough that a few of the Marines dotting the coconut-lined avenue started to laugh and holler and whistle as they passed. “Don’t let my fool ass die of blood poisonin’! Please, Lawd! Deliver me from my own damn laziness!”
“Shut up, Snafu!” Eugene spat, and reached forward to shove at Shelton’s chest with his good arm. Shelton stumbled back, but he was laughing, teeth bared and pale eyes glittering with mirth.
“Careful there, Genie,” he teased, strolling confidently backwards without bothering to look where he was going. A little, forgotten coal flickered bright in Eugene’s belly at the unexpected nickname and his face flooded with a familiar, tingling heat. Shelton’s grin sprawled broad and sharp and white. “You go pickin’ fights, you liable to need another visit with the corpsman, an’ I ain’t draggin’ your ass down there again.”
“Didn’t ask you to the first time,” Eugene grumbled, and grudgingly followed Shelton as he picked his way back up the hill toward their squad tent. The sun blazed low across the horizon, bleeding waves of pink and orange out into the slowly darkening sky and licking hot over Eugene’s shoulders, the back of his neck. He felt wrung out, like a piece of washing that had been scoured and twisted and beaten mercilessly in the hope of scrubbing out a particularly stubborn stain.
“Did it anyway, didn’t I, cher?” Shelton grinned, and ducked into the tent with little fanfare. From inside, he called jeeringly, “‘sides, what’d Missus Sledge say if she saw you bein’ so ungrateful?”
“She’d probably tell me to keep it up. That you deserve a good, hard knock about the head,” Eugene replied sourly and stepped in after him. He stumbled at the threshold, a shallow wave of dizziness rolling through him, and only didn’t go sprawling into the dirt because Shelton was somehow suddenly there, one hand grasping hard at Eugene’s good arm and the other fisted tight over the back of his sweat-drenched dungarees.
“Easy now, Sledgehammer. No need to go throwin’ yourself around like some boot can’t handle his liquor.” He loosed his grip on Eugene’s elbow and transferred the hand he had on Eugene’s pants to settle around the curve of his waist. “Let’s get you settled ‘fore you do yourself any real damage throwin’ that tantrum you seem so keen on.”
“You dropped me on the floor,” Eugene scoffed. Shelton rolled his eyes and deposited Eugene none too graciously on the narrow frame of his rack.
“Picked you back up right after,” he riposted breezily. “Got you movin’, anyhow, and that was the whole point. You’da sat here all goddamn day gettin’ that shit in your blood if I hadn’t and I ain’t heard you thank me yet.” Eugene scowled and Shelton’s mouth quirked, amused by Eugene’s irritation and bull-headedly confident in his own superiority, as always. He pointed to something just past Eugene’s shoulder and announced, “Water’s over there. Doc says you gotta keep hydrated.”
Eugene turned to discover not one but two canteens tucked neatly onto the stacked wooden ammo crates—empty, of course—that he had put to service as a makeshift nightstand. They were lined up primly beside the reappropriated Japanese rubber document bag he used to house his Bible and his notes and all his covetously scrounged pencil stubs. Shelton must have gone and filled them both while Eugene was suffering through treatment down at the aid station.
“That yours?” he asked, brow furrowed, gesturing to the second canteen, still in its button-flapped canvas casing. Shelton shrugged.
“Ain’t usin’ it,” he replied. He was standing near enough that it was only a matter of shifting his weight to knock one of his knees gently into one of Eugene’s. “You gonna lie down now, Genie, or you waitin’ on me to tuck you in?”
That little ember in Eugene’s belly hissed and sparked, the entirety of his abdomen coming alive with a fluttering wave of warmth that hummed up through his skin like a buzzing swarm. He didn’t understand why Shelton appeared to have suddenly changed his tune again, though he was sure that the clues were likely all there.
The dim ache stubbornly rooted in Eugene’s temples made the simple act of seeing a thought through to its end as fruitless as catching water in a sieve, otherwise he might have been able to puzzle it out on his own. As it was, he felt seconds from keeling over and succumbing to the deep-seated exhaustion that seemed to saturate his every pore. He was in no mood to play Shelton’s games.
“Why’re you doin’ all this?”
It took Eugene a second to realize that he was the one who had barked the demand into the muggy air. It hung there for a second, stuck between the two of them like a mayfly freshly caught in tar paper, wiggling and thrashing and so pitiful to look at that it made a man’s stomach twist. Eugene swallowed, so thick his throat may well have been coated with molasses, and grimly met Shelton’s gaze.
Shelton watched him for a long second, eyes wide under his thoughtfully furrowed brow. He licked shallowly at his bottom lip and then tucked it up under his teeth, chewing at it for a second before he asked, quiet and careful, “All what?”
The heat in Eugene’s belly cooled and curdled, gut churning sickly while his pallid cheeks flared through with shame and disappointment. He huffed a thin, furious breath and shook his head, rolling his eyes heavenward. It broke the strange tension that had slowly started to fill the room like steam rising up off the sodden jungle floor and yielded the unexpected reward of making Shelton flinch.
“Forget it,” Eugene muttered sharply, flopping down onto his good side. It was impossible to put his back to Shelton without taking the sling off, so he settled for curling his knees up toward his belly and aggressively folding his pillow in half before he shoved it between his neck and shoulder. “Thanks for the water,” he said, pointedly closing his eyes. “You can go.”
For a long moment the only sound in the tent was the steady rhythm of Eugene’s breath, still thready and shallower than it should be, though the corpsman had promised that would fade. He kept his eyes screwed shut tight and focused on breathing slowly through his mouth, trying to force his lungs fuller and fuller with every low gasp despite the vice-like band that had settled into place around his ribs courtesy the infection in his blood. He startled when the canvas of his cot suddenly dipped and blinked up to discover Shelton perching awkwardly at the edge.
He had another cigarette in his mouth and his gaze fixed absently on the lighter he was fidgeting with, both his hands together between his knees. While Eugene watched him, Shelton sighed through his nose and reached up to scratch at one of his eyebrows with a thumb.
“Snafu, what - ” Eugene started cautiously, but Shelton cut him off with a little shake of his head, a lazy sweep of his hand through the air.
He sat there for a long minute, worrying over some thought or maybe rallying his courage, until he finally flicked a quick, darting glance over at Eugene and offered benignly around his cigarette, “I meant what I said before. Ain’t no place for it, not here.” One side of his mouth tilted up and he jerked his head over his shoulder, presumably gesturing in the vague and imagined direction of America. He rolled his gaze that way, too, adding ruefully, “An’ there sure as shit ain’t no place for it back there.”
Shelton’s knee jiggled nervously and he huffed a soft, bitter laugh through his nose before he turned his eyes back toward Eugene. There was something faintly fevered in them, lighting them from behind like sun-soaked jade. He reached out with a slow, careful hand and pushed Eugene’s hair up off his forehead, a painful parody of the same stilted affection he had allowed himself that morning, when Eugene was too dazed to turn him down.
This time, Eugene stayed carefully, purposefully still, not willing to risk even blinking while Shelton was coiled tight like a bear-trap ready to be sprung.
“Every step we get closer to home, folk gonna have somethin’ worse to say about it,” Shelton explained, fingers hovering tentatively at Eugene’s hairline. His voice was low and brittle in a way Eugene hadn’t heard since they were screaming at each other through the dark, drenched in freezing Okinawan rain while their squadmates slowly unravelled in the muck beside them. Here, in the fading twilight of the sticky coastal evening, Eugene let his eyes slip shut, basking in the heat of Shelton’s palm and the familiarity of his touch.
He swallowed, a distant ember of hope beginning to glow in the dark, lonely chasm that’d been eating at his insides for weeks, and offered hoarsely, “S’pose it’s a good thing we’re headed to China, then.”
When he opened his eyes again Shelton was staring at him, both eyebrows quirked and amusement tugging at the corners of his mouth. He shook his head again and chuckled under his breath, pawing clumsily at Eugene’s hair—half tousling, half petting—until he had his fingers properly tangled in it. Eugene licked at his dry mouth and tried not to squirm as Shelton relaxed back into him, his narrow hips slotting in neatly against Eugene’s stomach.
“Think you missin’ the point, Sledgehammer,” he chided, but he was grinning.
“No, I don’t think I am,” Eugene argued gently. He shifted so that he could nudge the knuckles of his good hand up against Shelton’s knee, palm curled in softly toward him, and pressed their bodies closer still. “I know it ain’t - ” right, he nearly said, catching the word behind his gritted teeth with a small noise of frustration. He worked his jaw for a second, thinking, and corrected quietly, “I know I ain’t gonna be escortin’ you to any cotillions back stateside, Snaf. I ain’t ever been interested in all that, anyway.”
“Shame,” Shelton teased, petting fondly at Eugene’s hair and letting his knees splay a little wider, leaning into Eugene’s touch. “I look damn fine in a dress.”
Eugene rolled his eyes and Shelton laughed again, softly. His mirth was still barbed but so much sweeter without the finely honed knife-edge of cruelty that had warped it over these last miserable weeks, forging it into more weapon than honest expression. God, how Eugene had missed the sound.
“Ain’t no place for it,” Shelton repeated absently, gaze roving almost drunkenly over Eugene’s face. Eugene blinked up at him.
“But?” he offered, voice small and hopeful.
Shelton’s eyes snapped to his immediately and held there for a frozen moment, hunted and haunted and hooded with want. He sighed, low and long, and tightened his fingers in Eugene’s hair nearly tight enough to sting, grasping for just a second before he gave it a gentle little tug.
“But,” he echoed, and Eugene couldn’t bite back the smile that bloomed across his face. He was sure that he’d gone embarrassingly pink, but Shelton just smirked down at him and clicked his tongue. “But,” he repeated, a little louder, “now I seen how poorly you take care of yourself without me around to keep an eye on you, I’m thinkin’ it might be safer for the both of us if I stick close.”
“Right,” Eugene agreed, shifting a little further onto his back and hooking the fingers of his good hand casually over the hem of Shelton’s nearest pocket. “Safer.” He pressed his teeth into his lower lip and asked with as much politely affected Alabama naivete as he could muster, “How close were you thinkin’ you might stick, exactly?”
Shelton, catching onto the game immediately, canted his head thoughtfully back and forth.
“Dunno,” he drawled, curling his free hand over the frame of the rack up near Eugene’s head. He leaned forward so that he was poised over top of Eugene, smirking down with all the sly self-assurance that had ensnared Eugene’s attention so thoroughly in the first place all those months before. There was still a good foot or so of space between them, but Eugene could see each one of Shelton’s barely-there freckles, every bristle in the fan of dark lashes that swept fetchingly down over his color-shifting eyes. “‘Bout here?”
Eugene shook his head a little, hair rasping against his pillow, against the canvas cot.
“No?” Shelton clarified, amused. His lush mouth tilted up into a grin, corners gone soft with promise. “Well, cher,” he drawled, voice curling low and warm and sweet through the pit of Eugene’s belly, “where d’you want me?”
“Here,” Eugene breathed, reaching up to clutch at Shelton’s undershirt and pull him in until their mouths brushed. He felt it when Shelton smiled and his heart trembled in his chest at the familiar sensation, pulse roaring in his ears so loud he almost couldn’t hear himself when he murmured, “Just here.”
He was dizzy again for awhile after that, but this time there was no need to bother the corpsman about it.